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Open Access: Free the Research

Woo hooooo! Open Access Week is here! Hard to contain your excitement, isn’t it? If you weren’t around for last year’s global event promoting OA, and are wondering if anyone other than librarians should be interested, here’s how the organizers describe open access:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

The best OA introduction is still Open Access 101 from SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This great animated video (~3 minutes), explains the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

And check out A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access (PDF), which explains two ways the research community provides open access, through OA journals (more on those tomorrow) and OA archives or repositories.

Be sure to stop by the Library between now and Friday to pick up information about Open Access, chat with your librarian, and enter our Open Access raffle. And stay tuned to RFoD for more information throughout the week.